Saturday, December 20, 2014

For the past eight months, there has
been a furious battle raging behind closed doors at the White House,
the C.I.A., and in Congress. The question has been whether the Senate
Select Committee on Intelligence would be allowed to use pseudonyms as a
means of identifying characters in the devastating report
it released last week on the C.I.A.’s abusive interrogation and
detention program. Ultimately, the committee was not allowed to, and now
we know one reason why.

The NBC News investigative reporter Matthew Cole has pieced together a remarkable story
revealing that a single senior officer, who is still in a position of
high authority over counterterrorism at the C.I.A.—a woman who he does
not name—appears to have been a source of years’ worth of terrible
judgment, with tragic consequences for the United States. Her story runs
through the entire report. She dropped the ball when the C.I.A. was
given information that might very well have prevented the 9/11 attacks;
she gleefully participated in torture sessions afterward; she
misinterpreted intelligence in such a way that it sent the C.I.A. on an
absurd chase for Al Qaeda sleeper cells in Montana. And then she falsely
told congressional overseers that the torture worked.

Had the Senate Intelligence Committee been permitted to use pseudonyms for
the central characters in its report, as all previous congressional
studies of intelligence failures, including the widely heralded Church
Committee report in 1975, have done, it might not have taken a
painstaking, and still somewhat cryptic, investigation after the fact in
order for the American public to hold this senior official accountable.
Many people who have worked with her over the years expressed shock to
NBC that she has been entrusted with so much power. A former
intelligence officer who worked directly with her is quoted by NBC, on
background, as saying that she bears so much responsibility for so many
intelligence failures that “she should be put on trial and put in jail
for what she has done.”

Instead, however, she has
been promoted to the rank of a general in the military, most recently
working as the head of the C.I.A.’s global-jihad unit. In that perch,
she oversees the targeting of terror suspects around the world. (She was
also, in part, the model for the lead character in “Zero Dark Thirty.”)

This is an example of another reason not to permit women in the military. Women are not considered to be fully accountable in modern American society, and soldiers who are unaccountable to civilian leadership are not desirable in anything that still pretends to be a free society.

58 Comments:

Almost as troubling is that a writer for the New Yorker cannot grasp the distinction between "principle" and "principal" -- "It never alerted the F.B.I., which had the principle domestic authority for protecting the U.S. from terror attacks."

Is she actually in the military or is she a CIA employee with a civilian pay grade of SES 1-4 (equivalent to a military general)? The New Yorker story doesn't really make that clear, but the NBC report calls her a CIA official. Not that it makes much difference in the long run.

Note how this "report" pushes the leftwing agenda. Note that NBC News is COMPLETELY in the tank for Obama, and has been for years. Note how this tends to back up Feinstein's narrative.We citizens will never see the truth of intelligence ops. We will only see what they want to reveal. Someone is pushing a narrative here. I can smell it.

Out of curiosity, what do you think of the esteemed Mr. Wright's argument that what the CIA did was not, in fact, torture?

I disagree. The CIA clearly violated the Geneva Conventions in spirit, although not in letter, if I understand correctly, since the Conventions don't apply to the non-military figures involved. It's obviously torture, although a relatively mild version of it.

I'm mostly concerned about it as a successful precedent. If you haven't learned that the government will always take a mile once you give them a seemingly justifiable inch at this point, there isn't much to discuss.

"If you haven't learned that the government will always take a mile once you give them a seemingly justifiable inch at this point, there isn't much to discuss."This is probably the best argument against the use of torture that I've heard. Many people, myself included, have no problem with explicit torture of jihadis. And by "torture," I'm not referring to waterboarding, I mean thumbscrews and the whole business.But if the US had a professional cadre of torturers on hand, the only thing stopping them from being used on citizens is the self-restraint (HA!) of the government.If that weapon existed, it would eventually be used against the rest of us.

If I understand Wright correctly he would answer that there can be no such thing as mild torture, and torture is always extreme. So waterboarding, as an example, does not count as torture because you'd always chose waterboarding over, say, being set on fire. Whereas if somebody said to you "take your pick - scaphism or immolation?"reasonable men might disagree on what was preferable.

I think I tend to agree with you on this though, especially your final sentence. I don't see any contradiction in saying that torture has degrees.

Brigadier General Janis Karpinski, who had been commanding officer at [Abu Ghraib], was demoted to colonel on May 5, 2005. In a BBC interview, Janis Karpinski said that she was being made a scapegoat, and that the top U.S. commander for Iraq, General Ricardo Sanchez, should be asked what he knew about the abuse

In a BBC interview, Janis Karpinski said that she was being made a scapegoat

High-larious. No matter how much responsibility you give them, they'll always point the finger elsewhere. She was the freaking COMMANDING OFFICER, for crying out loud. But someone who isn't there was obviously to blame. Because man. IT'S NOT HER FAULT!

The guy who took the brunt of Abu G was the commanding officer of the 205th Military Intelligence Brigade, a colonel named Pappas. I know this because I was in that brigade from '03 to '06.

Anyway, she passed the buck. Pappas was 'forced to retire', which is what the military does when they want a problem to go away and stop causing them headaches. I met him a couple of times; he was a genial, clueless guy who came up to about your chin.

By the way, Abu G was a raging shitshow, run by officers who had no business being there. A lot of the personnel were reservists and Nasty Girls and had no clue what they were doing. My company was infantry attached to MI, and we used to run night patrols on foot outside the walls. Several times the wekend warriors with the .50 cals almost blew us away as we were oming back toward the front gate.

Fifty Seven wrote: "By the way, Abu G was a raging shitshow, run by officers who had no business being there. A lot of the personnel were reservists and Nasty Girls and had no clue what they were doing. My company was infantry attached to MI, and we used to run night patrols on foot outside the walls. Several times the wekend warriors with the .50 cals almost blew us away as we were oming back toward the front gate."

I was deployed at the same time, and, while I came to a good many of the same conclusions that you have, I tended to think a great many of the torture accusations were a little over the top, especially when some politicians at the time were decrying as torture things that a great many of us were enduring daily riding in the back of a guntruck, kitted out with body armor and other assorted accouterments in 125 degree heat, not to mention things we'd endured as a part of our training. Still, it was disturbing, and, in typical military fashion, the troop on the ground gets shafted the most, even if deservedly so, while the "clueless" leadership gets off relatively scot-free.

What I find really disturbing, however, is the entire atmosphere of this "national conversation". The pursuit of war is not some theoretical, abstract thing; it is indeed terrible, even if at times necessary. The discussion regarding torture is an important one, but one that we're only having because we chose to go to war unconstitutionally and without firm proof that Hussein had WMDs or was even involved with 911. It turned out to be yet another meddlesome, "make the world safe for democracy", hobby war of the neocons, disguised as part and parcel of defending our folk here at home. It wasn't. My service had nothing to do with "support[ing] and defending the Constitution, against all enemies foreign and domestic," or of legitimate national defense. So which is the greater evil, the supposed torture, or going to war, killing, maiming, and being maimed and killed, for demonstrably illegitimate reasons?

A "nation" who has time for this kind of relatively limited discussion, including time to worry about feminist, LGBT, and other radical egalitarian issues in the military isn't serious, and it is clear evidence that said "nation" is under no serious, existential threat justifying said war.

Anyway, these are questions that continue to haunt me about my (and others') military "service", back then and now.

Oy vay! Another shanda fur de goyim! She married a neocon, David Silverstein, and has been fast-tracking ever since.

http://cryptocomb.org/?p=338

Wouldn't it be better to have a member of the American Nation in a job like this? Smiting the Amalekites like she does is going to bring down a lot of grief on the USA. I don't think this is asking too much, is it? There is no way in the world the Mossad would put an American goy in a job like this.

"I'll bet no one can tell me the difference in a few sentences each between IS, ISIL, ISIS and Al Qada."It depends on what the meaning of IS IS- Billy Clinton

For all intents and purposes they are the same, muslims that practice jihad, taquiyya, jizya , and al-hijra. AQ was just 300 goat fookers before 911. The only people that say otherwise are those who say self described muslim jihadists are not muslim or jihadist.

1. Most intelligence officers are freemasons or related/affiliated group members and freemasonry is not open to women. I do not know this for a fact but it is claimed very plausibly by the author of "Behold A Pale Horse" William Cooper.2. jews have used and continue to use connections to get to highly prestigious positions for which they are not best qualified for (to put it mildly and despite the widely held notion that they are smarter than normal people).3. jews love torture as I have mentioned before4. there is a long tradition of jews in government (State Dept. etc.) who hurt US interests by their actions. It is a matter of debate whether it was by incompetence or by deliberate design.

"Sorry but 57 or any other US military people here, you mention "Nasty Girls""

I cant say for certain but he might be talking about the girls who rent themselves out in the back of Humvee ambulances. There are lots of nasty girls around the military. There will be girls that almost every guy in a battalion except the medics and the gays have been with. The medics know the names of the hoes that pass along diseases, and don't want to be the 25th guy in the day like that Magaluf video where the woman said she was raped after blowing 24 guys on video in a bar contest.http://metro.co.uk/2014/07/04/magaluf-sex-act-video-british-girl-who-gave-oral-sex-to-24-men-told-she-would-get-holiday-4786590/

Senior Executive Service (SES) is the General Officer/Flag Officer equivalent for government civilians. GS-15 is currently the highest non-SES grade for GS Civilians and is roughly equivalent to O-6 (Colonel) in the Armed Forces. Most presidential political appointees hold an SES grade, even if temporary.

"“A country which sends poor women into wars concocted by rich men in safety is not worth fighting for.” - Dr. Clyde N. Wilson, Professor Emeritus of History, University of South Carolina

I was largely against female participation in combat deployments before I deployed; I'm even more adamant about it now. Even without the trollops, lesbians, and other female SJWs, they just don't belong in the military (except for limited duties, perhaps, such as admin and nursing)! Is that sexist? You bet it is! And, frankly, so what?

If somebody doesn't understand this, then we're on different planets and I won't waste time explaining it.

I know I'm on my own here, but I couldn't give a shit if we do harsh interrogations (we seriously tell people we're going to waterboard that it won't kill them?) to whatever degree. That's based on the assumption those being interrogated aren't American citizens or not Geneva signatories. I consider it the number one job of the government to keep Americans safe. And I hate when we start saying "we're better than that" and "that's not who America is" because it's the bullshit kind of codewords and phrases that Obama and his comrades use to weaken America (domestically and abroad) while pretending to stand on some grand moral authority.

Matamoros: All too true. None of this feminist b.s. of whatever stripe in the U.S. would ever have seen the light of day without pussified and pussy whipped men enabling it all.

Genesis 3:11, God confronted Adam - "And he said, ‘Who told you that you were naked? Have you eaten from the tree that I commanded you not to eat from?’ The man said, ‘The woman you put here with me - she gave me some fruit from the tree, and I ate it."

I asked my husband today, "Where was Adam?" regarding Genesis 3:6 -"When the woman saw that the fruit of the tree was good for food and pleasing to the eye, and also desirable for gaining wisdom, she took some and ate it. She also gave some to her husband, who was with her, and he ate it."

My husband responded, "He was probably horny."

We're in it together, male and female - and each have much for which we will be held accountable.

Even the native Americans were sufficiently wise not to have a Comandress in chief. The Lizard Queen might have additional meaning in terms of the parts of the brain that aren't present in a Queen e-Lizard-beth

Terry Goodkind's "Sword of Truth" series (Wizards First Rule is the first) feature "Mord Siths" who are women who torture (even to the point but not crossing into death) without conscience. One cannot criticize him on the basis of unreality.

"I do not know this for a fact but it is claimed very plausibly by the author of "Behold A Pale Horse" William Cooper."

Don't believe everything you read on the internet or otherwise. That isn't conspiracy theorist stuff, that is tinfoil hat stuff.

Regarding the "Zero Dark Thirty" movie when I saw a clip of a soldier saying the woman was the real deal when it came to the analysis my BS detector pegged out. Didn't bother with it and had no intention of watching.

It's weird to have another Calamity Jane coming to light. Look up Jamie Gorelick: she built the legal wall that prevented information sharing prior to 9/11; was at Fannie Mae before it melted; acted as defense lawyer for Duke University for railroading the lacrosse non-rapists; and joined the Amazon Board of Directors months before Amazon and Hatchett blew up. Everything she touches, turns to crap.

"Instead, however, she has been promoted to the rank of a general in the military,"

That clueless comment threw me. My first thought was "Maybe Claudia Kennedy isn't as retired as she claims," but that didn't work for timing. My second was Mary Legere, but she wasn't in the right time or place to have dropped the ball with regard to 911. And no one else fit remotely. And what's the issue? Freaking journalist idjits don't know the difference between promotion to the rank of general in the military and promotion to the equivalent of flag rank. (There is, by the way, a way to take a pure civvie and make them up to two stars, but it's very narrow.)

Tom Kratman: I think that Harvard Professor Samuel Elliot Morison was created a Rear Admiral. Writing 15 volumes of "History of United States Naval Operations in WW2" sounds like a pretty narrow way to go from civilian to two stars.

The one I'm thinking of belongs to SecArmy. He can pull people off the street and make them up to two stars for military government / civil affairs missions. Morrison was taken on as a USNR Lt Cdr then promoted from there. he wasn''t made a RADM until retirement.